How to find the explicit version of a song on Spotify
Spotify has over 40 million active users. It is easily the most popular on demand music streaming service available. One of the application’s drawbacks is its apparent lack of explicit versions of songs. For whatever reason, in many cases only clean versions of songs appear to be available. There’s the rare case in which the rights holders made only the clean version available, but it turns out that explicit versions are there most of the time. It just takes some digging to find them.
It would probably be easier if the explicit versions were the default setting for every song and album or if you could set your preferences as to which version should be the default setting. Until that happens, here is a guide to finding the versions you’re looking for on both the desktop app and the mobile app.
Spotify’s Desktop App
Finding the explicit version is much easier to do on the desktop app. Sometimes songs are clearly labeled as explicit.
Edited versions can be indicated by the song title and lack of the explicit label.
But Spotify isn’t 100% consistent with these labels. If you find yourself unintentionally listening to a clean version, check for different versions of the same album. At the bottom of an album (or single) page, there may be a dropdown button labeled “1 MORE RELEASE.” This list can include standard editions, deluxe versions or international versions (in many cases, the deluxe version is actually listed as an entirely separate album in the artist’s catalog), but most of the time, this button allows you to switch between the album’s explicit version and its clean version.
An easy way to tell which is which (without having to play a song) is by checking for a parental advisory label on the album’s cover art.
Clean version:
Explicit Version:
Sometimes you’ll see a parental advisory sticker on the artwork but no “Explicit” label on the individual songs or vice versa because Spotify gon’ Spotify.
Spotify’s Mobile App
Things gets trickier on phones and tablets because the mobile app doesn’t display a “1 MORE RELEASE” button on an album view. Finding the explicit version on mobile means relying entirely on seeing a parental advisory sticker or using a more brute force method.
Let’s take an example. I want to listen to Drake’s album “Nothing Was The Same.” My best bet is to search for the album directly. In the search results, the four different combinations of standard edition/deluxe and clean/explicit are listed as four separate albums. These are easy to distinguish by the “(Deluxe Version)” text shown in the album’s title and the parental advisory sticker shown on the artwork.
Searching directly for the album results in these different options. Had I gone to the artist page and then clicked on the album, I risked being stuck with the clean version.
Here’s a different example to illustrate this possibility. The Snoop Dogg artist page shows his most recent album “Doggumentary.”
There is no parental advisory sticker on the cover, so we can assume it is the clean version. (This is confirmed when I actually hit play.) There is no way to select the explicit version from Snoop Dogg’s artist page or from the album view.
If I searched for “Snoop Dogg Doggumentary” however, the results would list both the clean and explicit versions.
On the odd occasion that there’s no parental advisory label or that the song listed in your search results doesn’t have the mobile version of the “Explicit” label, you literally have to click on all of the options to see which one has the curse words. It sucks, but there isn’t any other option when you get to this point.
When you do find the right version in the search results, click the “…” button just to the right of the song title, then select “Go to Album.” You have now found the explicit version of the album on your mobile phone.
Follow Rahul Pandya on Twitter @RJayP.
